ART: Hipsters, Hustlers and Handball Players

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art thru Oct 17, a retrospective of photos by famed street photographer (and West VA native) Leon Levinstein (d. 1988). From the Met:

Leon Levinstein (American, 1910–1988), an unheralded master of street photography, is best known for his candid and unsentimental black-and-white figure studies made in New York City neighborhoods from Times Square and the Lower East Side to Coney Island. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the Metropolitan's collection, will feature some forty photographs that reflect the artist's fearless approach to the medium. Levinstein's graphic virtuosity—seen in raw, expressive gestures and seemingly monumental bodies—is balanced by his unusual compassion for his offbeat subjects from the demimonde.

Born in West Virginia in 1910, Levinstein moved to New York in 1946 and spent the next thirty-five years obsessively photographing strangers on the streets of his adopted home. (source) <---click there to read more

PHOTO: Robert Frank @ The Met

Robert Frank - Trolley - New Orleans 1955

Frank was not Southern but many of his photos, including the one above, were taken there.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans
September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010

	Learn more about a special one-day lecture and panel event.

This exhibition will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition will include a full set of contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series. (source)

ART/SCENE: Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

Image from Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Although Walker Evans was not from the South, a lot of the work that he is famous for was created there. His exhibit of Picture Postcards is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection and is on display thru May 25.

The Met is hosting a "Gallery Talk" about Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard today (4/14) and again on April 29.

April 14, 2009
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
The Howard Gilman Gallery
Free with Museum admission

Museum curators, conservators, educators, independent scholars, and advanced students of art history regularly present Gallery Talks that focus on specific aspects of the collection, as well as on special exhibitions.

The exhibition displays hundreds of picture postcards drawn from the vast collection of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). This indigenous American realist art form directly influenced Evans's artistic development, as is demonstrated by a selection of his own photographs, printed in 1936 on postcard photographic paper.
Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator, Department of Photographs, MMA